An open-source software ecosystem for the interactive exploration of ultrafast electron scattering data

Abstract

This paper details a software ecosystem comprising three free and open-source Python packages for processing raw ultrafast electron scattering (UES) data and interactively exploring the processed data. The first package, iris, is graphical user-interface program and library for interactive exploration of UES data. Under the hood, iris makes use of npstreams, an extensions of numpy to streaming array-processing, for high-throughput parallel data reduction. Finally, we present scikit-ued, a library of reusable routines and data structures for analysis of UES data, including specialized image processing algorithms, simulation routines, and crystal structure manipulation operations. In this paper, some of the features or all three packages are highlighted, such as parallel data reduction, image registration, interactive exploration. The packages are fully tested and documented and are released under permissive licenses.